Sunday of the Holy Trinity (Matthew 28/16-20)
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
There was a lovely church, built in the early years of the 20th century by fervent Irish immigrants, in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York, during that city’s rapid and roaring industrialisation. The church was called Blessed Trinity parish on Leroy Avenue. It may be closed now, swallowed up by changing demographics of Buffalo, but it was a remarkable church on many levels. All the bricks were hand-made, and the style was a rebirth of the 14th century Florentine style of architecture. The interior was unmatched in its originality. The floors, the walls, the ceiling, the pews and kneelers were individually decorated with precision and detail of every kind of flora and fauna known to man. Stepping into the church, one felt one had entered a laboratory of science. Presiding serenely over this explosion of detail was a magnificent icon of the Blessed Trinity on the high altar.
The church was built and decorated in the shadow of the infamous American court case called the Skopes Monkey Trial (1925) in which Darwinism was imposed upon the unwitting American people. Under the title of science, the false religion of Charles Darwin and his claim (without any proof or evidence!) that the existence and immense variety of life on this planet is purely the result of random chance and natural selection, and that the human race is essentially nothing more than gorillas with better hygiene, was imposed upon the American people. Amazingly, these poor Irish labourers fought back against this tyrannical engineering, not with arguments but with beauty. With an effort that involved every single person living in the geographical boundaries of that parish, each person contributed in some way to producing this exquisite piece of truth and beauty. Old men and women held the stencils for the artists; children gave their pennies for the tiles, men and women hurried to the site after working in the factories to help paint and draw by the light of lamps and candles. All this was done during the great Depression (1929-1934) which saw countless people thrown out of work. The church became a source of labour and resources for those who had nothing.
On this beautiful feast of the Blessed Trinity, I wish to invite you to enter this theatre of war, since the same outlandish claims of Charles Darwin hold power everywhere.
Every Catholic is free to accept any good scientific evidence which points to the age of the universe and the development or evolution of the human body, but we are not free to accept the pseudo-religion of Darwin which denies the divine work of creation. The feast of the Holy Trinity, which celebrates the divine origins of Creation and Redemption is an essential day, which must be repeated every day until this false idea is ground to dust and dispersed to the winds.
† Selim Sfeir
Maronite Archbishop of Cyprus